Non-photorealistic Renders (NPR)

Comments

Love the new work you have posted. I love, love, love your work! Keep them coming. They are awe-inspiring. Did I mention that I love your work...

Midnight_stories:

Those are awesome illustrations as well! I know what you mean about feeling like our work is nowhere near his, but yours are always fantastic too. Everytime I look at them I wonder why you haven't published a graphic novel, or comic series yet. But, I know you are a busy man with all your wonderful content creations. Keep up the great work on both fronts, and keep your NPR work coming as well. Helps keep me inspired to play.

Thanks for checking out the thread and taking the time to chime in, DaremoK3. The feedback is truly appreciated!

I'm working at putting together a portfolio to try to get game illustration work. It had occurred to me that full photorealistic renders are sort of... not super useful for most game art. So... working on more lineart and similar.

Liked your sketch effect, so I thought of giving it a try. Here is my humble attempt for fun. I cheated and used Photoshop. It's definitely not as good as yours or the others but the good thing is, it only took only about ten minutes to do fooling with the filter gallery.

I'm debating directions for my webcomic. I think I'm going to try a colored toon style -- flat color with sketch on top. I'm debating how much shading vs. lines. PWToon offers a lot of tools to control these parameters.

One of the key elements to making it work is making sure the surface has a good amount of detail for the shader to draw, when needed -- with something with fur or scales this means a good displacement map.

Originally I was thinking of tossing the diffuse maps and replacing with simple color, but now I think I can get much the same effect by amping up the light levels to somewhat 'wash out' the color details a bit.

Liked your sketch effect, so I thought of giving it a try. Here is my humble attempt for fun. I cheated and used Photoshop. It's definitely not as good as yours or the others but the good thing is, it only took only about ten minutes to do fooling with the filter gallery.

Lyam - I cheat, too! I am only using DAZ to analyze the scene - nothing more. Is that the Brute?

It looks more robust than PWToon, although I REALLY like working in DS. May be worth experimenting with, though. Hmm.

So I'm attempting NPR approach to my webcomic, which started out in 3DL, switched to Iray photorealism, with a few experiments with NPR. My previous attempts at 'art style' renders with my comic were unsatisfying -- it took a lot of work and I wasn't happy with the results. I had been attempting post production efforts, which have some critical problems (namely, that a filter has no idea that THAT bit is a character and THAT bit is wallpaper). Then experimented with the default dzToon, which has other problems (like being unable to cast shadows ?!?).

Ugh. Just tried to import a DS scene into Carrara and it was utterly mangled. Think I'll stick with PWToon.

(I've found it very hard to work with DS content in Carrara. There's a LOT of conversion which frequently doesn't work for no obvious reason)

Unfortunate, because I could really use the 'oversample lines.' With PWToon, I've sometimes encountered lines that look badly jagged, which is annoying (and not easily fixed unless I do a separate 'line' pass and blur it.)

algovincian you inspired me so I had a play with Filter Forge and came up with this.

To get the edges, I took her into Photoshop, then blended the edges over the sketch from FilterForge.

Woot woot! More people getting sucked into NPR ;)

Filter Forge keeps getting mentioned - maybe I'll take another look at it. I remember checking it out years ago, but I'm sure there have been changes. Your results look great - thanks for contributing to the thread!

algovincian you inspired me so I had a play with Filter Forge and came up with this.

To get the edges, I took her into Photoshop, then blended the edges over the sketch from FilterForge.

Woot woot! More people getting sucked into NPR ;)

Filter Forge keeps getting mentioned - maybe I'll take another look at it. I remember checking it out years ago, but I'm sure there have been changes. Your results look great - thanks for contributing to the thread!

This is not artwork but rather a test ("proof of concept"). And it's obviously very primitive-looking because my NPR shader-fu is next to nonexistent (I'm a physicist not a mathematician... LOL)

Three 3Delight passes combined:

a) your basic "photorealistic" render: GI, SSS, what have you. Just a normal render, using the pathtracer module and my custom physically-based shaders.

b) A pass with a specialised shader in the REYES hider. The shader does screenspace hatching. The hatch pattern is a texture made in Paint.NET. The only light here is UE2 in "ambient" mode, so it's very fast.

c) A normal-based outline pass using the Outline script coming with DS. For best results, higher pixel samples should be used and the pixel filter should be set to gaussian a couple pixels wide. Playing with other params can also help. It outputs white outlines, so it gets inverted in the image editor.

For best results, the lighting should match between the hatching pass and the basic one. But I was being lazy.

This is not artwork but rather a test ("proof of concept"). And it's obviously very primitive-looking because my NPR shader-fu is next to nonexistent (I'm a physicist not a mathematician... LOL)

Three 3Delight passes combined:

a) your basic "photorealistic" render: GI, SSS, what have you. Just a normal render, using the pathtracer module and my custom physically-based shaders.

b) A pass with a specialised shader in the REYES hider. The shader does screenspace hatching. The hatch pattern is a texture made in Paint.NET. The only light here is UE2 in "ambient" mode, so it's very fast.

c) A normal-based outline pass using the Outline script coming with DS. For best results, higher pixel samples should be used and the pixel filter should be set to gaussian a couple pixels wide. Playing with other params can also help. It outputs white outlines, so it gets inverted in the image editor.

For best results, the lighting should match between the hatching pass and the basic one. But I was being lazy.

That looks great, Kettu! And your custom physically-based shaders are excellent. Thanks for posting and sharing a bit about your process.

This shows one of the limitations of PWToon. While this specific image came out to my satisfaction, ideally I'd want the ability to have a line along his leg where the calf presses against the thigh. Since there is a good texture and color, the division shows decently, but if I was doing a B&W image there might be a problem.